


How to Heal

by EHyde



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 16:29:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1394449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EHyde/pseuds/EHyde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short fic about Daphne Allen, exploring her character and the brief time she spent with Castiel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Heal

Daphne Allen lies when she tells people how she gave Emmanuel his name. A coincidence added to the sense of the miraculous. The number of people who would say to her— “Why, that’s amazing! Did you know that the name Emmanuel means ‘God with us?’”  _Why no sir, I didn’t; I somehow managed to avoid hearing a single Christmas carol in my entire twenty-seven years of existence._ She’d lied to Emmanuel himself about the name, too. She might tell him the truth, someday, but right now—she’s still afraid.

The fact that no one ever notices the resemblance between Daphne’s husband Emmanuel and the mass-murderer who’d declared himself God—that’s the real miracle, as far as Daphne is concerned.

 

She doesn’t recognize him at first, either, because he’s naked and flat on his face, and while it turns out that “oh god, what if he’s a mass murderer?”  _is_  one of the first things that crosses your mind when you’re alone in the woods and you run into a naked man, “what if he’s a mass murderer god?” really isn’t. But he’s alive and he probably needs help and he probably  _isn’t_  a mass murderer (because,  _come on_ ), and so she grabs a sturdy tree branch from the ground—just to be careful—and tentatively approaches him. “Uh—hello?” No response. She bends forward and taps him gently on the shoulder.

Suddenly he’s standing up and looking right at her and he’s taller than she thought, and she thinks that the branch she’s holding wouldn’t do much good, and he’s saying something but it isn’t in English or any language she’s familiar with except it sounds a bit like Judoon but that’s a fictional language and it shouldn’t have even been on the show in the first place because the Tardis should have translated it and  _it’s amazing the sort of things you think about when you’re panicking because you’re alone in the woods with a strange naked man who’s speaking to you in gibberish._ She tries again. “Do you understand me?”

He stares at her, looks into her eyes and holds her gaze for an uncomfortably long time. “No,” he says, finally. “Perhaps if I spent more time getting to know you—”

That breaks the spell, and Daphne almost laughs. “No, I only meant, did you understand what I was saying. Which you obviously did. Um. What—happened?”

“What happened when?”

“What happened to you?”  _Where are your clothes?_  “Were you swimming?” The river was supposed to be off-limits to swimmers, but people did it anyway. Sometimes there were drownings. “How did you end up here?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t remember anything?”

A pause. “I don’t remember anything.” Daphne doesn’t realize, then, just how true that statement is.

 

It’s when she’s brought him back to her dad’s house—she still thinks of it as her dad’s house—that she recognizes him. She’d pulled out a box of clothes that she hadn’t managed to give away yet and then, while he was getting dressed, she opened up a new tab to see if there were any missing persons reports in the local news. But the story about the trench-coated psychopath is still open in her browser and she can’t help noticing that he looks a lot like the guy she found.  _Calm down,_  she tells herself. How would that even make sense?  _A psychopath who thinks he’s God isn’t going to pretend to be helpless_. Unless he was doing one of those I-was-a-beggar-and-you-took-me-in test things … _well, in that case, I passed the test, right? I’m being a good Samaritan_  … The thought that she might be aiding a mass murderer was not particularly comforting. But he comes downstairs and he’s wearing her dad’s most garish sweatervest and all at once, the thought of him being a killer, or God, seems completely ridiculous.

 

After two days, everything about the situation seems suspicious. “God” hasn’t made any appearances since she found the man. But he’s kind, and gracious—and has as complete a case of amnesia as it’s possible to have. If he is this “God,” she’s convinced he doesn’t know it, and so she doesn’t take him to the hospital—she doesn’t want to see him punished for something he can’t remember doing (even murder? Daphne doesn’t want to think about that. She _has_  to, but she doesn’t want to). She researches the killings, too, and realizes that things don’t add up. All the news sites—all the reputable ones, anyway—are doing their best to provide rational explanations for what the killer did, but it just doesn’t make sense. She’s not prepared to believe it was actually God—she doesn’t think she believes in God—but he could have been some kind of superhero, or mutant, or something.

None of the sites provide a clear enough image to be absolutely positive it’s her guest, but she’s becoming more and more convinced.  _But he’s different now_ _._ Was he only different because he’d forgotten? What would happen if he remembered who he was? She names him on the third day. Names him Emmanuel— _God with us_ —because—what if he was?

 

She keeps him, cares for him. Tells him stories, because comic books are full of strange people with mysterious origins and if she surrounds them both with those stories the situation might just start to seem normal. It almost works, until Pastor Mark comes to check in on her.

“Haven’t seen you much, not since the funeral,” he says.

“I’ve been busy,” she says. He looks around the house, looks at her dad’s things scattered around in half-packed boxes. “I’ve been taking care of someone,” she explains. “He’s kind of sick.”

Pastor Mark nods. “Have you thought about returning to medical school?” he asks.

Daphne has. She’s thought about it every day. “I’d make a terrible doctor,” she says.

The pastor chuckles. “You make a terrible liar,” he counters. “I’m going down to visit Mary Shepard,” he says. “Would you like to come along?”

She knows what he’s doing, trying to make her believe that she does have a calling after all. But callings only exist in stories, Daphne thinks. “I would,” she says. “But I shouldn’t leave Emmanuel alone.

“Your friend can come too, if he’s up for it.”

“He is,” says Daphne, agreeing against her better judgment. Mary Shepard and her dad were good friends.

 

The older woman has cancer, and she’s undergoing treatment, but it’s too little, too late. She explains this to Emmanuel as they sit in Pastor Mark’s car, but he just looks puzzled. Sometimes Daphne misses that naivete, the idea that if a doctor helped you, you would live, simple as that. But even if she had finished school, even if she were a doctor, she wouldn’t be able to do any more for Mary Shepard than Pastor Mark was doing now.

“Would you like to be healed?” Emmanuel asks, as they share a pot of tea with the old woman.

“Well, of course,” she says with a smile, and he leans over and places his hand on her forehead. She gasps and Daphne takes Emmanuel by the shoulder, quickly leading him out of the house with a hasty apology. She’s not able to find the right words to explain to him what he did wrong.

 

Pastor Mark visits again the next day. “Mary Shepard’s cancer is gone,” he says. “I need to know more about your friend Emmanuel.”

Emmanuel is in the room with her, watching her as she drops the mug she’s holding. “This … isn’t normal,” he says. “Is it.”

Daphne shakes her head. “No, Emmanuel, it’s not  _normal,_ ” she says. “I can’t just choose to make people better.” She runs upstairs to the side of her dad’s bed and cries and cries.

When she finally dries her tears and steps out to the top of the stairwell, Paster Mark is still there, talking with Emmanuel. He sees her and stands, picking up his coat to leave. Daphne thinks she knows what they were talking about.

“I’m sorry you didn’t find me sooner,” Emmanuel says.

Daphne doesn’t trust herself to speak.

“Pastor Mark wants me to visit some other people,” Emmanuel says. “I think I should. I don’t know where this gift came from anymore than I know anything else about my past. But with great power comes great responsibility, and—”

That breaks the spell. “Gotta listen to Uncle Ben,” she says. “It’s a wonderful gift.” And then the tears are back, and she sits down next to him, and just leans on him.

“Do you know how much medical school costs?” she asks, after a while.

“No.”

“Not as much as my dad’s treatment. But if we’d still had that, then maybe—”

“No one can tell what the future holds,” says Emmanuel. “All you wanted to do was help people.”

 

Daphne’s convinced, now, that her Emmanuel is the same man from the news. It’s hard, almost impossible, to reconcile the kind, innocent man she knows with the mass murderer from TV. But it’s even harder to accept that there would be two near-identical men who could both perform miracles.  _Why not?_  she asks herself.  _Maybe whatever this is is genetic._  But no. It’s not genetic, not some comic-book mutation. These are miracles, simple as that. She tells herself that the murder was a deviation, a corruption, that this is the real Emmanuel. Knowing him, living with him, it’s easy to believe.

 

Word of Emmanuel’s power spreads. “I don’t know how to deal with this,” Pastor Mark confesses to her. His church had never dealt in faith healing.

“Maybe it’s better if I take care of it,” says Daphne. “You’re busy enough already.”

Pastor Mark pauses. “The faith-healing crowd, they won’t really approve of a woman running the affairs of their healer.”

_Do they want to be healed or not?_  Daphne wants to ask. Instead, she jokes, “So we’ll pretend I’m his wife.”

“Marriage isn’t something to be taken lightly,” Pastor Mark says, taking her words more seriously than she’d intended. “But … that might actually be the best course of action.”

Emmanuel accepts this. “I’m not in love with you,” he says. “And I can’t promise I’ll always be here for you.” It’s the first time he’s hinted that he might leave. “But you took me in, and cared for me. It doesn’t feel like a lie.”

 

They make a good couple, if an odd one. “Wanting to be a doctor seems silly now,” she comments. “Seeing what you can do.”

“I only heal one person at a time,” Emmanuel counters. “And only those who come to me. I’ve seen how much you care for those who hurt. Don’t stop when I’m gone.”

“You are leaving, then.”

“I don’t know,” says Emmanuel. “But this doesn’t feel permanent.”

Daphne understands. It doesn’t feel permanent to her, either.

 

The end, when it comes, is more violent than she expected. The man who takes Emmanuel away looks at him like he knows him, and Daphne is desperate to ask him about the man on TV, the murderer, god. Or even just to ask for a name. She doesn’t, though. Whether it’s fear that holds her back or just a desire to hold tight to the memory of the Emmanuel she knows, she isn’t sure. But watching the two of them drive away, she’s sure she’ll never see Emmanuel again.

 

She calls Pastor Mark that night. “He’s gone,” she says. Mark comes over, sits with her, talks. He comes over the next evening, too. The day after that, Daphne calls the registrar’s office at her old university. She won’t stop.

**Author's Note:**

> Daphne Allen in the context of that episode made ... basically no sense. And I'm pretty sure that the random redshirt demons were given more screentime than her. So, I just wanted to give her a bit of background, try to make her more of a real character instead of a plot device. I hope I succeeded.
> 
> I'm fallenwithstyle on tumblr if you want to come say hi.


End file.
